Insights

Washington – June 14, 2021: Crowell & Moring has been recommended in six practice areas in the 14th edition of the Legal 500 United States. In addition, partner Daniel R. Forman, co-chair of the firm’s Government Contracts Group and Management Board member, has been named to Legal 500’s “Hall of Fame” for Government Contracts, and Antitrust & Competition partner Megan L. Wolf has been named a “Next Generation Partner” for Merger Control. The firm’s full rankings can be viewed here.

Washington—October 14, 2020: Crowell & Moring is expanding its antitrust bench with the addition of Stefan Meisner, a first-chair defense litigator with extensive transactional and criminal antitrust investigations experience. Meisner joins as a partner in the Antitrust and Competition Group and brings more than two decades of experience representing Fortune 500 companies in significant, cross-jurisdictional antitrust matters.

On April 23, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC” or “the Agency”) voted 3-2 along partisan lines in a special public meeting to adopt the “Non-Compete Clause Rule” (the “Final Rule”), which will prohibit most employee non-competes with retroactive effect, except existing non-compete provisions of “senior executives.”  The Final Rule will also ban future non-compete agreements, including for senior executives, with limited exceptions.  The rule will not become effective until 120 days after publication in the Federal Register, and covered employers will be required to comply with the Final Rule by that effective date, which could come as early as August this year.  By the FTC’s own estimate, this ban could affect up to one-in-five American workers.

On Friday, February 3, DOJ announced in a press release that it has withdrawn support for three joint DOJ-FTC policy statements that explicitly describe certain “safety zones” applicable to information sharing among competitors and the formation of certain competitor collaborations (including healthcare provider joint ventures and accountable care organizations (ACOs)) that the antitrust agencies did not intend to prosecute. See 1993 Policy Statement, 1996 Policy Statement, 2011 Accountable Care Organizations. The FTC has not yet withdrawn its support for these statements and the DOJ does not apparently plan to issue new guidance, which may result in the agencies applying differing standards and, at a minimum, creates more uncertainty about how the agencies will evaluate conduct covered by these guidance documents.

This week, a federal grand jury in Las Vegas, Nevada returned an indictment charging a health care staffing company and one of its former managers with entering into an unlawful agreement with a competing staffing company to allocate employee nurses as well as to fix nurses’ wages. This indictment comes on the heels of recent statements by Acting AAG Richard Powers and others in Antitrust Division leadership that the DOJ will continue to aggressively crack down on what it believes are unlawful no-poach agreements, and signals a continued focus both on no-poach and related issues as well as the healthcare industry more broadly.

Participants of the GICLI Annual Meeting share valuable experiences and practical strategies for handling government investigations and related civil litigation at collegial roundtable and panel discussions. An open, knowledge-sharing forum is encourages throughout two days of breakfast sessions, workshops and casual, relationship-building events.

Since the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission jointly released the Antitrust Guidance for Human Resource Professionals in 2016, the DOJ has been actively and increasingly investigating criminal conduct in employment practices, issuing indictments and opening companies to follow-on civil class action lawsuits. And President Biden’s recent Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the 21st Century specifically calls out labor market competition, further ratcheting up the pressure.

Please join members of Crowell & Moring’s Antitrust & Competition practice for a discussion centered around what to expect in 2021 resulting from the transition in administration and Congress, and how these changes are likely to impact antitrust enforcement and antitrust law more broadly. In particular, the panelists will discuss: